The Best New Novels of 2025, According to an Expert (Me)
I've got some hyper-specific picks for you: Best climate fiction, best historical fiction, best rom-com, best novel that could be described as “cerebral," and the novel I most want to see turned into an HBO miniseries.
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It wouldn’t be mid-to-late December without a series of “best of” articles coming out from every outlet that covers culture—and who am I to buck that trend? I get to read dozens of books every year for Jezebel, and I’m here to put all that reading to use by doing one of my favorite things: recommending books.
But there are too many books—and I am but one, part-time reader—for me to do a broader “best of” list, and besides, there is so much variation in what people are looking for when it comes to books (even when you narrow it down to literary fiction, which I have here). So to get around that conundrum, I’ve made my recommendation categories hyper-specific, boiling the new novels I read this year into five picks for you: Best climate fiction, best historical fiction, best rom-com, best novel that could be described as “cerebral,” and the novel I most want to see turned into an HBO miniseries.
(And I want to just say a brief thank you to you, the Jezebel readers; I love sharing the internet with you. Happy reading, happy holidays, and happy New Year!)
Best climate fiction: Wild Dark Shore, Charlotte McConaghy
A woman washes ashore on the beach of a remote island in the southern Pacific, where a seed vault stores specimens of millions of species in cold storage deep underground. The island’s tiny population—its caretaker, Dominic Salt, and his three children—now have to figure out why she’s there, and what to do with her. The island’s unique plant and animal population are already facing the brutal effects of climate change (in this already fairly brutal landscape), and as the newcomer opens up to the Salt family, she reveals that she is too: Her home, which she built to withstand Australia’s ever-worsening fires, was recently destroyed in one.
Climate change is a theme in so many good new books, though many of them skip ahead and ask, what happens after? What makes Wild Dark Shore so moving is that it’s happening in the present; McConaghy’s characters’ lives are already deeply changed by its effects, and they have to figure out how to move forward as individuals but, more importantly, with each other.
Best historical fiction: The Pretender, Jo Harkin
In 1484, a young boy is whisked away from his comfortable life on a farm by well dressed noblemen, who tell him that he’s not actually a farmer’s son but the Earl of Warwick, who was placed into hiding as an infant so that he could someday reappear to claim the English throne for the Plantagenets. (You do not have to be a British history nerd to enjoy this book, but it doesn’t hurt.)
The boy grows up, taken from various courts to hiding places, befriending other young royals, reading everything he can get his hands on, and realizing that he is just a pawn in a larger scheme for control. The boy (who alternately goes by John, Simnel, and Edward) is incredibly sweet as a narrator; he tries to do right by everyone, only belatedly realizing he should try to do right by himself. Jo Harkin’s written a deeply fun book, and I came away feeling that I’d learned a lot about the War of the Roses, even if only in terms of vibes—and that’s exactly what historical fiction should do.
Best rom-com: Loved One, Aisha Muharrar
This is not a romance; it might better be categorized as a “rom-com-dram.” It’s about longtime friends Julia and Gabe, who briefly dated, grew apart, and then got back together over the years, and about all the attendant baggage that sort of relationship comes with. Simple enough premise—except that Gabe is an indie rock star, and the novel starts at his funeral.
The novel traces Julia attempting to process her grief (made all the more complicated by Gabe’s fame), and her relationships with Gabe’s mom and his most recent ex-girlfriend, Elizabeth.
It’s tender, and sweet, and as author Aisha Muharrar has said in interviews, a bit of a mystery!
Best novel that could be described as “cerebral”: Ruth, Kate Riley
Book marketers absolutely love to call a novel “cerebral,” and Ruth fits that bill to a T—if only because reading it is like dipping into the titular Ruth’s head a handful of times over her life.
Ruth lives in an Anabaptist community as the world outside is rapidly shifting; hearing about the Civil Rights movement or the Soviet Union through the haze of Anabaptist isolationism is a bit of a trip. Ruth is curious about the world, but not so much that it ever occurs to her to leave, and readers looking for a pulpy cult story will not get that here. Instead, this book is a window into an alternative way of living, one that maintains a deeply communitarian ethos, with what I found to be a frankly beautiful commitment to God and each other, but that is built—of course—on a foundation of retrograde gender roles and self-abnegation.
There is not much in the way of plot in Ruth, and that’s part of its charm; like the Anabaptist community at its center, it’s unusual and ever-so-slightly off-putting, but also charming and thoughtful. In this novel, we simply get to spend 200-odd pages with Ruth, which is satisfying in and of itself.
Novel that I most want to see as an HBO miniseries: Vantage Point, Sara Sligar
I started off 2025 by devouring this one toward the tail end of the holidays last year, and I’ve been thinking about it ever since. Jess has married into a famous family that’s got a tragic, Kennedy-esque curse, and now her husband is running for Senate in Maine. But when a video drops purporting to show her best friend and sister-in-law, Clara, having sex with a stranger, things go off the rails, quickly. More scandalous images emerge, some targeting Jess and her husband, and it becomes clear that there is some digital manipulation—or wholesale invention—at work. But by whom? And why?
This one is quite pulpy; a literary thriller that builds just enough tension before its climax, and that you feel in your bones is not going to end well. (Bonus: Readers who know Maine will be tickled by how well Sligar nails the details.)
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